New gender recognition law challenged
as ‘highly dangerous’

In response to the Government’s announcement this week concerning proposed legislation for gender recognition of transsexual people, the Evangelical Alliance affirms its championing of the basic human rights of minority groups, such as transsexual people, and agrees that there are valid justice issues to be considered on a case by case basis. [More...]

However, it insists that wholesale proposals to fundamentally alter the matrimonial law of Britain and redefine what it means to be male and female are of such immense importance, that they go well beyond what is acceptable for even a tolerant society. Should it be a human right, enshrined in legislation, for a man, for example, to pass himself off as a woman and insist the rest of society collude in the deception? Is there not a much more fundamental and contrary human right for a third party not to believe unreality?

The starting point in this debate is the evident fundamental fact, as corroborated by the recent decision of the Law Lords in the Elizabeth Bellinger case, that people cannot change their sex. Accordingly, any suggestion of falsifying or distorting historical fact and record must be resisted.

Granting full legal rights to transsexuals or gender confused people are, like similar concurrent proposals for civil partnerships, designed to make same-sex marriage acceptable, and may frequently violate the rights of third parties by encouraging denial of reality and common sense. In particular, conventional marriage and the family will yet again be undermined, with the potential for family breakdown accelerated.

The Alliance calls on the Government to stick to the parallel civil partnerships legislative approach in considering transsexual partnerships, and not allow transsexual same-sex relationships to be described as ’marriage’ which must be retained uniquely as the union between one biological man and one biological woman – as both orthodox Christianity and the major faiths, as well as the existing law, insist.

Don Horrocks, the Evangelical Alliance’s Public Affairs Manager, who edited the Alliance’s ‘transsexuality’ report in 2000, commented that “the impression is rapidly growing that in caving in to such extreme minority agendas, the Government has become obsessed with narrow sectional interests, so that arguably Britain now has the most marriage and family-hostile system in Europe.”

He warned that some implications of this proposed Bill could be that third parties may find themselves in front of civil courts if a transsexual person feels offended that their self-selected gender is not recognised and accepted, whilst there are countless implications for society if original birth records cannot be accessed and gender can legally be altered with a relative minimum of formality.

“It appears that someone will only have to wear the clothes of the opposite sex for a relatively short period of time and convince a panel they are serious about it to be legally classified as a member of the opposite sex, requiring the rest of society legally to treat them in their chosen gender, whether they are successful in passing themselves off or not”.

Previously the Evangelical Alliance has called on the Chief Medical Officer to hold a full independent inquiry into the causes and treatment of transsexuality, a call which has been refused, even though transsexuality has been well known for a long time as a form of obsessive identity disorder.

Now controversially described by the Department of Health as a ‘medical condition’ – though arguably only made such in recent years through the availability of cosmetic technology to make surgical engineering possible – the Alliance urges the Government to undertake long term studies into the effects of surgical intervention to cosmetically manufacture gender change before imposing legislation which radically undermines the traditional and well-established common-sense understanding of marriage and sex.